I agree with Dr D on this. I actually thought about this many months ago but figured I'd save the request for later. While famous sites keep all activity data, some of us might want to reduce our server impact after getting our communities big.
I'm not saying I would want an auto purge after just 30 days which indeed would feel limited for the users. But perhaps a year or two, maybe even 3-4 years of time might be a good cut off time to have the data auto purge. It's not just to save space, but posts aren't as relevant and are much less visible due to being buried so deep. Their articles and such would still display in the profile themselves.
Even more important is auto purging of old private messages. The admin should be able to specify the time length for both of these. There is a free Joomla
extension that has this capability.